Rainfall

floater on the waves, a person with no direction. A masterless samurai.

    He waited for me to answer, but I didn’t. Finally he said, “Is what I am saying inaccurate?”

    “No,” I admitted, thinking of Crazy Jake.

    “You are samurai, Rain-san. But samurai cannot be samurai without a master. The master is yin to the samurai’s yang. One cannot properly exist without the other.”

    “What are you trying to tell me, Tatsu?”

    “My battle with what plagues Japan is far from over. My acquisition of the disk provides me with an important weapon in that battle. But it is not enough. I need you with me.”

    “You don’t understand, Tatsu. You don’t get burned by one master and just find another. The scars go too deep.”

    “What is your alternative?”

    “The alternative is to be my own master. As I have been.”

    He waved his hand as if to dismiss such nonsense. “This is not possible for human beings. Any more than reproduction is possible through masturbation.”

    His uncharacteristic crudeness surprised me, and I laughed. “I don’t know, Tatsu. I don’t know if I can trust you. You’re a manipulative bastard. Look what you’ve been up to while I’ve been in jail.”

    “Whether I am manipulative and whether you can trust me are two different matters,” he said, easily able to compartmentalize such things because he was Japanese.

    “I’ll think about it,” I told him.

    “That is all I would ask.”

    “Now let me out of here.”

    He motioned to the door. “You have been free to go since I came in.”

    I gave him a small smile. “I wish you’d said so sooner. We could have done this over coffee.”

25

    I TOOK MY time getting back to Tatsu. There were a few things I needed to settle first.

    Harry, for one. He had hacked the Keisatsucho files the same day I ambushed Holtzer at Yokosuka, so he knew I’d been arrested and “detained.” Several days later, he told me, all references to me had been deleted from their files.

    “When I saw those files had been deleted,” he said, “I thought they had disappeared you. I figured you were dead.”

    “That’s what people are supposed to believe,” I said.

    “Why?”

    “They want my help with certain matters.”

    “That’s why they let you go?”

    “Nothing for nothing, Harry. You know that.” I told him about Midori.

    “Maybe that’s for the best,” he said.

    He had most of the pieces, I knew. But what would be the use of either of us acknowledging any of that?

    “What are you going to do now?” he asked me.

    “I haven’t figured all that out yet.”

    “If you ever need a good hacker, you know where to find me.”

    “I don’t know, Harry. You had a lot of trouble with that music lattice reduction or whatever the hell it was. The Keisatsucho cracked it no problem.”

    “Hey, those guys have access to supercomputers at Japanese universities!” he sputtered, before noticing my grin. Then: “Very funny.”

    “I’ll be in touch,” I told him. “I’m just going to take a little vacation first.”

    I FLEW OUT to Washington, D.C., where Tatsu said they had shipped Holtzer. Processing his “retirement” would take a few days, even weeks, and in the meantime he’d be in the Langley area.

    I thought I’d be able to find him by calling all the hotels listed in the suburban Virginia Yellow Pages. I worked my way outward from Langley in concentric circles, but there was no guest named William Holtzer at any of them. Probably he had checked in somewhere under an assumed name, using cash and no credit cards, afraid I might be coming after him.

    What about a car, though? I started phoning the 800 numbers of the major rent-a-car companies. It was William Holtzer calling, wanting to extend his service contract. Avis didn’t have a record of a William Holtzer. Hertz did. The clerk was kind enough to tell me the license plate number of the car, which I told him I needed for some supplementary insurance I wanted to get through my credit card company. I was ready for him to ask why I didn’t just get the information from the key chain or the car itself, but he never did. After that, all I had to do was search a DMV database to learn that Holtzer was driving a white Ford Taurus.

    Back to concentric circles. That night I drove through the parking lots of the major hotels closest to Langley, slowing to examine the license plate of every white Ford Taurus I passed.

    At about two o’clock that morning I